Medical professionals often treat patients by prescribing a medication regimen designed to improve or stabilize a medical condition, ensure compliance with a court ordered rehabilitation program, to maintain the quality of life or to provide relief after the patient has suffered a trauma or is undergoing late stage illness treatment. A medication regimen typically includes instructions for a patient to ingest a prescribed medication at a specific dosage and at prescribed time intervals. The effectiveness of such medication regimens often depends on how well the patient complies with the instructions of the regimen. For example, if the patient does not ingest the medication at the prescribed time intervals or dosage, the medication regimen may be ineffective or even harmful to the patient.
Current arrangement exist to sense the presence that a pill or other medication has been removed from a package, e.g. a pill container, but such systems do not confirm whether the patient or subject does not take the medicine and has merely removed the medicine from the container in order to show the removal.
Patients or program recipients can fail to adhere to a medication or other dosage regimen for a variety of reasons. For example, elderly patients often forget to take medication or become confused because of the complexity of simultaneously taking multiple medications or adhering to multiple medication regimens or changing dosage requirements, e.g. increasing or decreasing the amounts of the medication. As another example, patients often fail to adhere to medication regimens because of the cost of a particular medication or combination of medications, fear of side-effects, underestimating the severity of a medical condition, misunderstanding instructions or just a general desire not to take the medication. Failure to adhere to a medication regimen can result in prolonged recovery time, deterioration of the medical condition, increased risk of new medical problems, increased medical costs or other undesired or unintended consequences.
What is needed therefore is a system to confirm compliance with a medication regimen in order to further the well being of the patient.